I had a good day at work today. I actually got to do some programming! I like days like today. There was a known set of expectations. Nobody was bothering me. I was able to put on headphones and just get my work done.

One of the things that I feel is true for the times when I’m kicking ass at life is a lack of chaos. I do not thrive in a chaotic environment. It raises my levels of anxiety more than just about anything.

Right now I am actively trying to find the points of chaos on my life in order to find a way to control them better. The largest and most consistent place of chaos is my work. I’m tackling this by taking a more active role in the planning of our projects and managing our clients. I have no experience in this but I’m doing my best. We have been successful in getting bugs and feature requests into a ticketing system. We have not been doing well at prioritizing those tickets, nor have we been extremely successful in communicating timelines to our clients. There are a lot of things that don’t really fit into a bug tracker. I don’t know what to do with them.

I’ve enjoyed taming our yard and seeing things growing. I like pulling weeds more than I did as a kid.

This doesn’t really seem like a post about kicking ass but believe me that removing the chaos paves a route for me to better living.

I believe I am currently in a state of mind where constructive progress can be made on a number of fronts. It took a long time to get back to feeling like a productive and valuable member of human society. For so long, my goals were simply to make it through the day.